World's oldest brewery carries on 1,000 years of tradition

Long before the Americans declared independence, centuries before Columbus
discovered the new world and before Guttenberg invented movable type, Germans were already perfecting the art of making beer. Even from a distance, the Weihenstephan brewery dominates the area. Perched atop Naehrberg Hill in Freising, a small town just north of Munich, the brewery was originally a Benedictine monastery founded in 740 AD by a monk named Korbinian.

It wasn't until the year 1040, when Abbott Arnold secured the brewing rights and license from a neighboring monastery, that beer was brewed there. Despite four fires, three plagues and a major earthquake, they have been brewing beer non-stop for nearly a thousand years.